Isabella Lewis was driving for Lyft on a Sunday in Plano, Texas, final August when she was carjacked and killed by her passenger. As her household tried to piece collectively what occurred, they stored receiving calls from an insurance coverage firm they didn’t acknowledge, however lastly realized it was Lyft’s insurer, who wished to examine Lewis’ automotive in order to find out whether or not it will pay to repair the broken windshield and clear up her blood.
To date, nevertheless, her household says it has not had any communication from anybody with Lyft’s company workplace.
“The only thing we have heard from Lyft is when they said in the Dallas newspaper that their hearts were with us,” Lewis’ sister Allyssa stated in an interview with The Verge. “I wish [Lyft] had handled the situation with more empathy. We didn’t feel like anyone had our back, as her family.” The fare for the trip was solely $15, Allyssa added. Her household needed to elevate cash for Isabella’s funeral service on GoFundMe.
Lyft didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark from The Verge.
Lewis is considered one of the extra than 50 gig employee drivers killed on the job since 2017, in accordance with a brand new report from advocacy group Gig Workers Rising, compiled utilizing publicly out there info, together with information articles, police studies, and GoFundMe campaigns. It highlights the dangers of gig work and the way households usually have little or no communication from the corporations concerned different than platitudes provided to the media.
The report discovered that extra than 63 p.c of app-based workers killed in the previous 5 years had been individuals of colour, despite the fact that they compose much less than 40 p.c of the US workforce.
The numbers in the report are in step with the restricted self-reporting from particular person platforms. In a neighborhood security report from 2021, Lyft reported 10 deadly assaults in opposition to drivers from 2017 by way of 2019. In 2019, Uber reported 19 deadly assaults over the previous two years.
(*50*) Murphy, considered one of the report’s authors and a former Lyft driver, stated in an interview with The Verge that she was motivated to analysis gig workers’ deaths on the job by her personal lived expertise, which included driving throughout the top of the pandemic with none workers comp or unemployment advantages out there to her. Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, and different gig work corporations think about drivers unbiased contractors ineligible for many advantages.
“No death should be happening as a result of companies not protecting their workers,” Murphy stated. She was appalled to find that many drivers killed on the job needed to flip to GoFundMe, like Lewis’ household, to cowl funeral prices. “Why is there no support, no call from their employer?”
Before Wednesday’s report, there have been already quite a few studies of rideshare corporations failing to assist households after a cherished one is killed on the job; in January, the household of Ahmad Fawad Yusufi, a refugee from Afghanistan, stated Uber had tried to skirt accountability for his demise throughout a botched theft try final 12 months.
Female drivers are significantly more likely to expertise security issues while working; a Verge report earlier this 12 months discovered girls who drive for rideshare corporations don’t really feel protected by the corporations they drive for. More than two dozen girls drivers interviewed described incidents with passengers who uncovered themselves, made sexual advances, or in any other case threatened them.
In its first-ever security report launched in 2021, Lyft reported 4,000 sexual assault claims between 2017 and 2019. An analogous security report from Uber in 2019 — its most up-to-date— revealed extra than 3,000 sexual assault claims between 2017 and 2018. Roughly half of the claims got here from drivers.
As a part of a day of motion Wednesday, driver teams are planning protests in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, and outdoors the San Francisco-area residence of Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. The teams are demanding modifications in how app-based corporations deal with workers, together with compensation for workers injured or killed while on the job, and an finish to compelled arbitration that requires workers to comply with out-of-court settlements in the occasion of a authorized dispute. They need legislators to compel the corporations to report information about accidents and deaths on the job publicly. Also on their want record: the proper for workers to prepare unions.
For her half, Allyssa Lewis stated she want to see extra screening of passengers for rideshare corporations; the man who authorities say killed her sister had no legal report however was beneath investigation by the FBI at the time of the taking pictures. “You always hear about the drivers, how they screen them to protect passengers’ safety, but what about the drivers’ safety? These companies should think about keeping them safe as well.”